Book Time #8: NYC Starter Pack Research
Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Book Time. I've got three NYC-related reads for you as I do my homework for the NYC starter pack.
Quick note: I'm no longer doing the Bookshop affiliate links. I did them out of curiosity, but they ended up being more trouble than they were worth. Going forward, you can assume any book I review is widely available through the usual methods unless otherwise mentioned.
Speaking of, since I'm no longer in the pocket of Big Bookshop, here is the official Book Time list of Ways to Obtain Books, Ranked:
Random stoop find
Public library
Loan/gift from a friend/relative
Stealing from a friend/relative
Downloaded from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, or similar online repository
Used from local book store
Used from non-Amazon online retailer
New from local book store
New from Bookshop or publisher's website
Getting a paper cut every time you turn the page reading The Power Broker
Amazon
OK, on to the reviews.
The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America, Charles Kaiser
New York used to be a dark place, a city of alleys and shadows. That darkness provided a cloak of anonymity to the people who needed it. Out back behind the bar, between two tenements, or underneath the Els running along Manhattan avenues, darkness was a defining feature of the city until the 1960s when the Lindsay administration made widespread streetlights a crime-fighting priority.
The Gay Metropolis is the first book I’ve read on New York City to prominently mention the darkness not as a metaphor or motif, but as a fact of life that affected the way people experienced the city. Gay people used the darkness to commit acts of love and lust at a time when such acts were illegal. To some people, darkness was part of the city’s landscape as much as the trains and the buildings. Any history that doesn’t mention it is missing a key detail of what it was like to live in New York at the time.
In what is otherwise an optimistic book about one of the most successful civil rights campaigns in human history, Kaiser doesn’t dwell on the darkness. This is precisely why The Gay Metropolis is such a triumph, because it treats an underclass as serious observers of the same world everybody occupies in service of painting a more complete picture of the place we all share. The core message of the most influential gay rights activists of the 20th century, and a viewpoint Kaiser echoes, is that a truly free society benefits not only those who have to live in the shadows, but even those who never noticed the shadows in the first place.
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital, David Oshinsky
A history of medicine more than a history of an institution, Bellevue is a solid work of history that nevertheless frustrated me. It dwelled on subjects that ought to have been asides and breezed past some of the most significant medical events and debates of their times. Oshinsky didn’t trust his readers with the full details of complicated medical debates or didn’t think they were important enough to dive into. At a brisk 330 paperback pages, there was space to go further and deeper. I wish he had.
Still, the book has its charms. “There never was a time when Bellevue appeared even remotely trouble-free,” Oshinsky writes, the kind of anti-nostalgia I wish would appear in more discussions of the past. For Bellevue, much of this sentiment derives from the fact that medicine as a whole was not a science until the late 19th Century. There are plenty of gory details in this book. The squeamish ought to stay away. But as a brief tour through how awful it was to be sick during the Victorian era, Bellevue suffices.
Still, I was left puzzled by several editorial choices. The 1918 flu outbreak gets a whole three pages, despite killing some 30,000 people in New York City out of a population of 5.6 million at the time, making it roughly as deadly on a per-capita basis as the the 45,000 killed by Covid when the city’s population was greater than 8 million (the book came out before Covid). The practice of lobotomy, done at Bellevue, gets one paragraph. Meanwhile, the treatment of two presidents in the 19th Century, neither of which were treated at Bellevue or in New York City, gets a whole chapter, because they were treated by doctors who also practiced at Bellevue.
Ethical debates are often presented briskly and without much subtlety. The ethics of electroshock therapy, especially for children, is treated as a Gotta Hear Both Sides debate in which Oshinksy vaguely refers to “safeguards” in place today but never describes what they are. Separately, Oshinsky notes a 1965 charge by then-Queens state senator Seymour Thaler that a virologist at Bellevue was “feeding live hepatitis virus to severely handicapped children…in order to test a vaccine” about which Oshinsky only says the accusation was “true on its face but lacking in context.” He doesn’t explain what that context was or provide any footnote or citation for further reading. Some Googling revealed it was a successful immunization program against the worst forms of the disease, and Thaler later recanted his criticisms. I don’t like finding out more about an event mentioned in a book from five minutes of Googling than I do from the book itself.
I have a higher tolerance than most for institutional histories and was hoping to get one about Bellevue. There is still a lot here for an interested reader in the history of medicine, and ultimately I'm glad I read the book, but I am left with many questions about Bellevue. I don't feel like I learned much at all about how Bellevue works and functions.
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, Will Hermes
Love Goes is a straightforward work, taking readers through the New York City music scene chronologically from the first day of 1973 to the last day of 1977. Hermes focuses on punk, rock, salsa, jazz and classical, all of which experienced transformative evolutions then and there. But Hermes demonstrates a depth of knowledge and keen eye for detail that is anything but straightforward. In picking his anecdotes, of which he must have had several books’ worth of material given the time and circumstances, Hermes recognizes a place and time that will never be duplicated.
Hermes has just the right amount of context and personal experience sprinkled throughout to situate the reader without ever losing focus on what the book is really about: the music and the people who created it. If you love music, New York, or both, Love Goes is a tentpole work. But you don’t have to know who Patti Smith is to appreciate what Hermes is accomplishing. Violent, disgusting, vicious, dingy, broke, cheap, visionary, brilliant, loud, experimental, transcendent, drug-addled and essential, often all at the same time, Love Goes is about more than music or New York. It is about how to make beautiful things while everything is falling apart.